It never stops being fascinating watching the mainstream media try to capture the magic of new live acts. Standup is forever generating new talents, new personalities, whole new ways of being funny. Some of these will find their way on to telly or radio; some, equally exciting, never will. Some – Count Arthur Strong is a recent example – will reincarnate in the nation’s living rooms in ways you never expected.

Last year’s Edinburgh comedy award-winner John Kearns embarked on this journey last week, with the premiere of a new four-part Radio 4 series. Kearns is the archetypal oddball comic, who’s seduced audiences mainly by being funny, of course, but also because his particular brand of funny is teasingly hard to put one’s finger on. Were you to try and do so, you’d be sticking your digit into the space between Kearns’s party-shop wig and false teeth, his wistful silences, and his goonish sad-sack persona.

That precise combination can’t be replicated on radio, a medium on which false teeth and wigs never quite fly. But Kearns’s comedy definitely has broadcast potential. In the past, he’s been compared to Hancock, an acknowledged influence that’s easy to detect in the first episode of his series, entitled The Ticket. It’s there in the conversations Kearns has with himself, a suburban nonentity: they’re jaunty but forlorn, philosophical, and defiant of his own insignificance. It’s there in the outer London bus journeys and lottery tickets from the newsagent (redolent of Hancock and his football pools), and the fantasies with which our hero leavens that humdrum reality.

The intriguing innovation here is that The Ticket isn’t dramatised per se; it’s told exclusively from the inside of Kearns’s head. We hear his interior monologue as he returns home from work, buys his lottery ticket, dreams of winning the barely imaginable sum of £100,000. It’s a neat trick, that obviously lends itself to the medium but also recreates (to some degree) the experience of seeing Kearns live, which likewise feels like a short, sharp trip inside a misfit’s mind.

Meanwhile, on BBC3, Edinburgh favourite and Uncle star Nick Helm is likewise translating his standup to a new medium. The fourth instalment of Heavy Entertainment screens this week, and it’s doing a pretty good job of capturing what makes Helm distinctive on stage. With its cutaways from live act to dressing-room interviews and back again, the obvious reference point is Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. To that formula, Helm adds a dramatic arc: episode three, Romance, traces his efforts, behind the scenes of the show’s recording, to get a girlfriend.

What you lose is the visceral discomfort of being locked in a small room with Helm, whose sweating, heavy-metal comedy trades in threat and humiliation (his, mainly), as well as humour. Helm’s now depressed, now apoplectic live persona is diluted; his gentler “real” self – revealed in the backstage interviews – shares equal billing. But it works, offering just enough of the live act to both satisfy and tantalise, underpinning it with a tongue-in-cheek backstory, too. Both Helm’s and Kearns’s new shows reflect the good health of UK standup. They showcase not only two new(ish) talents whose acts could never be mistaken for anyone else’s, but also a broadcast industry that cares and thinks creatively about how best to represent that in our kitchens and front rooms.